Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Abby Livingston, helming your daily dispatch from the Swamp and from the shores of Lake Michigan, where my colleagues John Heilemann and Tara Palmeri are on the ground reporting from the Republican National Convention.

In tonight’s issue, fresh reporting on the aftershocks around the Hill after Adam Schiff called for Joe Biden to step down earlier today. Plus John’s notes from an invitation-only session with the Trump campaign’s polling poobah, and highlights from the breakdown of the J.D. Vance pick on yesterday’s Impolitic podcast featuring Tim Miller and Stuart Stevens. Lastly, if you weren’t able to attend Peter Hamby’s recent panel in D.C. on the outsize impact of women voters over the age of 50—part of AARP’s “She’s the Difference” series—you can read the transcript of their fascinating conversation here.

🚨 Also, in case you missed Tara’s newsy interview with the Trump campaign’s political director James Blair, I wanted to flag perhaps the most remarkable moment from their conversation at the R.N.C. Yes, Blair claims the campaign is ready for any candidate, believes they have 24 pathways to 270, and are expanding their sights to Virginia, Minnesota, and even New Jersey as purplish-blue states that might now be in play. But he also said this, when Tara asked about Biden’s sophisticated ground game:

• James: Staff and offices—this is the Democrat shiny object. They’re trying to convince the media and their donors that they have a cure-all for the fact that they have spent $150 million in advertising and counting and have not moved the needle. In fact, they have moved backward during that period in all of the battlegrounds.

  Tara: How much have you guys spent in advertising so far?

  James: So far? Zero.

Okay, let’s get into it…

In the days since Saturday’s horrifying attempted assassination of Donald Trump, some pockets of the Democratic Party had concluded that Biden had subjugated the Hill. The drumbeat of Democrats calling for Biden to drop out quieted, at least until Schiff broke the seal on Wednesday. Every Democrat I’ve spoken with in the hours after Schiff’s announcement interpreted it as a major escalation on Pelosi’s part. And much like her quietly devastating appearance on Morning Joe last week, the former speaker can maintain a measure of plausible deniability. And, to be sure, a source close to Pelosi told Bob Costa that Schiff’s move was “news to her.”

Of course, long before this drama, Pelosi called in all of her California political chits to help Schiff knock out other Democrats who were hoping to fill the late Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat. A California Senate opening is a once-in-a-generation golden ticket in a deep blue state teeming with Democratic ambition. Pelosi was at his side at every turn—taking him around for San Francisco Pride last year and making $300,000 in donations from her leadership PAC to an independent expenditure supporting Schiff as he faced off against House colleagues Barbara Lee and Katie Porter. (Leadership PAC to I.E. is a highly unusual mode of contribution, and Schiff’s campaign was practically minting money anyway.) Pelosi had not committed this much political capital to a colleague’s career since she went all in for her best friend, Anna Eshoo, in her unsuccessful bid for the Energy and Commerce ranking slot in 2014.

Before Saturday’s shooting, the number of low-profile House members calling on Biden to withdraw seemed to be approaching a critical threshold. And in the last day or so, a deep frustration has been expressed to me that higher-profile members opposed to Biden had essentially scattered, leaving them high and dry as the political winds seemed to be shifting in the president’s favor.

That’s all changed now. The question, of course, is whether more members will come out—either allies of Schiff, disgruntled members who thought the window to oppose Biden had closed, or pretty much anyone who sees an open lane thanks to Pelosi’s stealthy Schiff-stirring.

And now a mini-column from John at the yeasty heart of Brew City…

The event in question was sponsored by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and the Cook Political Report and moderated by I.O.P. founder David Axelrod and CPR editor-in-chief Amy Walter. Axelrod began by asking Fabrizio how much the race has changed in the past three weeks, a period bracketed by a pair of truly seismic events: Joe Biden’s debate debacle and the ensuing panic in the Democratic Party about the viability of his candidacy; and Trump’s brush with death in Pennsylvania and the ensuing outpourings among Republicans of outrage at the assassination attempt, admiration for Trump’s resilience, and now jubilation here in Milwaukee over the party entering the summer of a presidential election year in the lead for the first time since 2004.

“Not much, numerically,” Fabrizio replied, pointing out that, because the pool of undecided voters is vanishingly small—5 or 6 percent in the battleground states, he reckoned—and the electorate is so polarized, big polling swings are basically impossible. But Fabrizio noted that Republican voters are more enthused and energized by Trump than Democrats are by Biden (true); and that Trump is pushing 50 percent of the vote in many swing states, while Biden has been stuck for months in the low- to mid-40s (true), which is bad news for him because undecided voters rarely break toward the incumbent at the end of a campaign—they tend either to pull the lever for the challenger or stay home (also true, historically speaking).

Even worse for Biden, Fabrizio continued, “The map has expanded and is continuing to expand”—with Team Trump now believing that Virginia and Minnesota are within reach and investing heavily to build out operations there, with more “expansion states” to come. What about the national polls that continue to show the race to be a statistical dead heat? “We spend entirely too much time focused on national polls,” Fabrizio said, when all that matters is the battleground states. Even so, “for anybody that’s keeping score, go back and look at where things were [at this point] in 2020. Today, Donald Trump is running 11 points ahead of where he was on this day in 2020. Eleven points! Nationally, Joe Biden had a double-digit lead [then].”

Fabrizio didn’t point out, because he didn’t need to, that the one group that constantly and loudly cites the sustained tightness of the national polls is the faction of Democrats angry at the public and private pressure on Biden to bow out. But Fabrizio made no bones about his astonishment—and his utter delight—at the stubborn refusal of the president’s people to come to grips with how much trouble their candidate is in. “I’m not here to give them any advice,” Fabrizio said, laughing. “But the more the Biden people are in denial about the situation, the better it is for us.”

It went on like this for nearly an hour, with Fabrizio arguing that J.D. Vance would be camping out all fall in the Rust Belt states, freeing Trump to expand the map; that regardless of which state ballots R.F.K. Jr. gets on and which he doesn’t, his candidacy is good news for Trump; that Cornel West is more of a threat to Biden’s ability to make up ground with African American female voters than people generally understand; and that almost all of Nikki Haley’s voters will eventually come home to Trump. Asked how many pathways the campaign has to 270 electoral votes, Fabrizio said there were so many, “We literally stopped counting at 25. The easiest path to 270 is, President Trump wins everything that he won in 2020, then he wins Georgia and wins Pennsylvania—that’s 270, and it doesn't include Arizona, it doesn’t include Nevada, it doesn't include Michigan, and it doesn’t include Wisconsin at the moment. And if you look at Biden’s spending, they have spent most of their money in Pennsylvania. And the interesting thing is they've actually gone backwards [in the polls] there.”

Fabrizio smiled a satisfied smile. “I know this sounds extraordinarily cocky or overconfident,” he said at one point. “I don’t mean to sound that way.”

Whether he meant to or not, of course, that’s exactly how Fabrizio sounded. But when the lunch was over, the Democrats in the room didn’t circle up and poke holes in his arguments, or mock him as arrogant, or claim that he was clearly spinning. Instead, like many Democrats across the country grimacing through the primetime proceedings at the Fiserv Forum and studying every twitch and flutter in the RealClearPolitics polling averages, they were talking yet again about Joe Biden, now in tones less furious or frustrated than desperate and despondent—wondering what, if anything, could bring Biden around, and plagued by the feeling that, as staggeringly fucked up as the past three weeks have been, there was more fuckery still to come.

And, hey, whaddya know, they weren’t wrong.

Finally, as promised, that dispatch from the Impolitic pod-sphere…

The following is an edited excerpt from our full conversation on the latest episode of Impolitic With John Heilemann, which you can download here.

Stuart Stevens: It’s a terrible pick. For one thing, J.D. Vance has not been vetted in any way nationally, and people are going to learn a lot more about Peter Thiel now, because we’re basically putting Peter Thiel on the ballot. Vance is an international investment banker who made his money working for a globalist investment banker. He’s someone who has said that women should stay in violent marriages. He’s someone who’s against abortion even in the case of rape, even though it was quote-unquote, “inconvenient.” Inconvenient? I mean, really? He’s a complete fraud and a phony who is whatever he needs to be in the moment.

Tim Miller: But other than that…

Stuart Stevens: Other than that, he’s a guy who, when asked what his greatest achievement in the Senate was, cited aspects of an infrastructure bill that he voted against.

John Heilemann: Tim, I’m on record as being someone who will never participate in the veepstakes speculation. Having said that, the only moment I indulged a little was after what happened in Butler, and I looked at the three frontrunners and their Twitter feeds. I saw Doug Burgum, who tweeted, “We all know President Trump is stronger than his enemies. Today he showed it.” I looked at Little Marco, who tweeted, “God protected President Trump,” and then a bunch of tweets attacking the media.

Tim Miller: Don’t love that tweet…

Stuart Stevens: I want to know what God had against the gentleman who was killed!

John Heilemann: Well, that’s a good question. Look, Little Marco’s not a towering figure in any respect, including in the consistent application of moral reasoning. But somebody tweeted something Rep. Bennie Thompson had said about introducing a bill to strip Secret Service protection from convicted felons who’ve been sentenced to jail, who are in prison, and characterized it as These nuts on the left want to strip Secret Service protection from Donald Trump. So J.D. Vance’s first move was to quote tweet that, and say, “Remember this? I do. Kick his ass out of Congress. Absolute scumbag,” about Thompson. And then, of course, Vance tweeted, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

So much wrong with that tweet, but as soon as I saw those three tweets, I’m like, Oh, J.D. Vance is going to be on the ticket. Because Marco and Doug Burgum were not doing what you need to do to be on Donald Trump’s ticket. J.D. Vance is playing the game.

Tim Miller: I felt the same way. You’ll never go wrong betting on Donald Trump and his campaign team to do the least responsible possible thing in any given situation. So I assumed it was going to be. J.D. Vance. I had a moment of self-doubt, in the fallout from the shooting, wondering, Does Trump feel like he’s in a position now to do something that is a little safer? But then I came back to my premise that you can assume that they’ll do the worst thing imaginable. Because J.D. Vance—you read that tweet—I think it was probably the single most irresponsible tweet sent by an elected official in Congress. The notion that the Biden campaign had been plotting this is wildly irresponsible at a time of high tension. There are a million things you could say in that moment—you know, praying for the Trump family, praying for the country. Instead it’s like, The other guy tried to kill him! Absolutely the worst possible thing you could do. So in that sense, it was a very Trumpy pick. I think Vance is a double-down pick on all of Trump’s ideology. It’s also a loyalty pick, which is weird, considering J.D. Vance implied that Trump might be Hitler at one point, but he has so lavishly sucked up to him in the intervening period, and befriended his sons, that Trump feels like it’s a loyalty pick.

Stuart Stevens: What I think is most interesting about the J.D. Vance pick is that, of all those people, the one who would go to the 25th Amendment to get rid of Donald Trump the fastest is J.D. Vance. And Trump better watch his back because if there comes a moment, J.D. will make his move and go for the king.

John Heilemann: Anybody who wears that much fleece is inherently untrustworthy. And just to say, Tim, Vance’s stance on abortion that Stuart mentioned earlier, I mean, it’s really out there. Here’s what Vance said when asked whether a woman should be forced to carry a child to term after she’s been the victim of incest or rape: “My view on this has been very clear, and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that’s wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of a child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”

That is a brutal piece of tape. And I can’t imagine that you could have picked somebody who would exacerbate more the problems Trump has been wrestling with on abortion for months and months, and has not really found a way out of, given the nature of the Supreme Court. This is going to bring that problem and explode it in his lap 10 times over.

Tim Miller: Yeah, not showing a lot of empathy there. It’s reminiscent of the Todd Akin quote that caused the Republicans to run away in 2012, when he said that in the case of rape, the female body has a way of shutting that whole thing down, so we don’t need to make laws protecting women who’d been raped. So I think it causes potential problems there. They also seem to think—or Don Jr. at least seems to think—that J.D. Vance is going to help them in the industrial Midwest when J.D. Vance ran, I don’t have it right in front of me, I think 13 points behind Mike DeWine? So whether it’s abortion, election denialism, the weird anti-vax stuff, I do think that he causes potential problems. He’s smooth. I think in a Harris-Vance debate, he probably projects to do a little better than Mike Pence did, but besides that, he’s bringing potential landmines.

John Heilemann: The main thing that surprises me is that it seems like Trump has had some kind of a turnabout about facial hair. Back in the day, he couldn’t go with Bolton because he looked too much like a walrus. And now he’s got J.D. Vance, with that beard, and he claims he looks like Lincoln. Maybe that’s the one way that Trump has really actually changed of late, is that he has decided that facial hair is a positive quality.

Stuart Stevens: I thought the most interesting moment was the Teamster speech because I think the Teamsters are going to end up endorsing Biden. The way the crowd reacted to Sean O’Brien, when he went after corporate interests and was talking about corporate terrorism, was fascinating. I thought, That’s a great speech. This is a guy who knows what he’s doing. But anytime someone goes on national television, with a big audience, and rips Amazon, that’s an interesting moment.

John Heilemann: Tim, I know you’re always keeping an eye on the absolute worst of the worst in your former party.

But Monday, there was no real message. As far as keeping my eye on the worst of the Republicans, this might be damning with faint praise, but I think that the worst thing they could have done coming out of Saturday would have been to have a convention tonight with a bunch of these people being like, And we’re gonna fucking get them back! Vengeance for Trump! I think an unhinged, angry, screamy convention would have been worse than a messageless one for them.

Stuart Stevens: About David Sacks, who co-wrote with Peter Thiel a book attacking diversity on campus… they had a section in there where they describe women who charge others with rape as having “belated regret.” So this is the first time, probably, where you have one guy who’s referred to as rape as “inconvenient,” and someone else who’s said rape is “belated regret.”

Stuart Stevens: I thought it was Joe Biden. There was that disastrous debate, but other than that, he’s a pretty predictable candidate. That’s his strength. Joe Biden is a classic example of someone whose negatives, because of the moment, become his strengths. The fact that he was sort of boring became “stable and predictable,” the fact that he’s been in the Senate since he was 29 became “experience,” and that was positive. And we’ve seen these kinds of things happen—it happened with Thatcher, it certainly happened with Churchill.

So there was this moment, but he didn’t change. He was the same person, and all of a sudden that became a positive. I think that’s what the Democratic Party needs to contrast with the Republican Party, which is why I think the whole Joe Biden thing is so insane. Trump is unstable, he’s unpredictable, and he’s dangerous. The Democratic Party has to convey an image of stability, predictability, safety. And that contrast is how you win the race.

John Heilemann: Tim is about to jump out of his skin.

Tim Miller: I just want to say I love Stuart. I pray every morning that he’s right about this, and that I’m wrong, and I’d love to be wrong. Stuart’s won more campaigns than me. I will say, I’ve been on a lot of losing campaigns, and I know what they smell like, so I do have a little bit of experience on the losing side that might be relevant here. But I hope Stuart’s right. My fundamental disagreement with Stuart is that I don’t think Joe Biden is the same. I think he’s the same person at heart and in his mind—I’m not suggesting that he has dementia or anything—but he’s not the same candidate. In these interviews, he doesn’t sound like the 2020 Joe Biden, and he sure as shit doesn’t sound like the 2012 Joe Biden who took on Paul Ryan. He sounds like an older guy trying to find his message and find his footing and is struggling to get there.

A 20-minute interview with rambling answers without a clear contrast with Trump, while kind of lashing out at the interviewer? I don’t know what that gets him. It gets at a fundamental disagreement, maybe, between me and Stuart about the state of the race. I feel like Biden’s got to win people back. I trust what the data says about the race, directionally, and I just don’t know who he’s winning back.

Stuart Stevens: Well, just to be clear, I don’t think we have a disagreement on the state of the race…

John Heilemann: That’s what I want to get to. I think among people who are aligned on the notion that Trump must be beaten, there are people who say, Hey, the bottom has not fallen out on these polls. Biden’s taking a hit, he’s still behind, it’s not great, but if you’ll look across battleground states it’s a small deficit, and it can be made up. Well, when I see the Times-Siena poll that has Virginia within three, and I see Slotkin having problems now in Michigan, and you see New Hampshire as being competitive and New Mexico as being competitive, in addition to the small-but-persistent deficits across all the battleground states—that, to me, suggests it’s not going the right direction. So my sense of the race is not that there’s no way Biden can win. My sense is that there’s a lot of public and private data that suggests that it’s pretty dark. Stuart, you think that the race is still well within reach, right?

Stuart Stevens: I go back to what I would call the structure of the race. I think that for America to elect a guy from Queens, who’s out on bail, who’s a convicted felon, whose hometown jury has found him liable of an assault that the judge called rape, a guy who says that America is a Third World country, and an uncivilized country… If you said that stuff about this country in a bar where I grew up, somebody would ask you to step outside. I don’t think that guy is going to be the next president of the United States. It’s contrary to everything that it means to be an American.

We’ve had Trump-like candidates since Trump, and overwhelmingly they’ve been rejected. Trump has won one race in his life with 46.2 percent. He lost [in 2020] by 7 million votes. He has to get new customers. Where is he getting those new customers? I don’t think that there are a lot of people who started that last debate as a Biden voter and ended up as a Trump voter. I think there are a lot of people that saw Biden and then had doubts about Biden. But I don’t think Joe Biden won the race in 2020 because he was a personality candidate—I think he won the race because he was a stable, safe choice versus Donald Trump. I don’t think that’s going to change.

So I think the structure of the race is the same. And you’ve had a couple of events that have favored Trump now—the debate, I think; certainly, Butler is something that increased Trump’s chances to win—but I don’t think it’s really going to have much impact. But that’s how I see the race.

John Heilemann: Tim, what do you think?

Tim Miller: I agreed with the first half of what Stuart said, about how the country doesn’t want to elect Donald Trump. It’s just that the country doesn’t like Joe Biden, either, and they keep telling us that. Stuart said that he thinks it’s insane to change horses given the nature of this race and having a stable candidate. But I think that’s a wildly crazy gamble, that’s just like, Hey, we’re going to go from late August all the way until November, and Joe Biden’s not going to do anything that reminds people of what happened during that debate. Biden said he’s going to debate again during that interview, and he’s going to do better. Are we really going to bet the country on that? That’s just a wager I don’t want to make.

I don’t know that Joe Biden is being honest with himself when he says that he can guarantee that he’s not going to have another night like Atlanta. So that’s where I’m at. I think the country doesn’t want either of these guys. James Carville has been on this for a while. It’s like, just give the country what they want, which is not either of these guys! And that, to me, seems like a safer bet.